THE BREAKDOWN: Indian Cricket Oversteps Again, English Football's Big Money Problem & Rugby's TikTok Dreams (E04)

27:48we will then run world cricket. We will run world cricket and maybe it will have a smaller audience but at least we will be able to run it in a way which has international sporting credibility and neutrality. It will have a smaller audience in the short term but maybe it has a much bigger audience in the long term. If you look what India is doing to destroy cricket in the West Indies then you can see these things. If you're applying the same model you've just outlined and talk about how all of that money could be put towards some of the 90 odd members which are kind of like half members they're called.

28:17and let's say you develop that proper ecosystem in those 90 countries where at the moment they're getting less than a million a year from the ICC then what a system you could have it's not going to be tomorrow but the longevity of the sport needs something like this what we know the longevity of the sport doesn't need is a reinforcement of this dominance because it will not support anything other than India continuing this cycle of of control yeah so I guess we just sort of finish on this and say this is a call and I'd love to hear when we've said stuff about other sports we've had the governing bodies of those sports get in touch and say either that was spot on or you need to take this into consideration we need to take that into consideration we are calling out the ECB right now and Cricket Australia but as things currently sit we're sat in London, in fact how far are we from Lourdes here?

29:03A mile and a half We're walking distance from Lourdes and saying to the ECB guys, are you honestly saying that 30 million quid a year buys you off? Really? Is that where we've got to? Okay, let's hear from you. And anyone at the BCCI obviously interested to put another side of the story across. We are also available. Sorry, I don't want their statement. I don't want their views. I want another statement. I want another statement that is so hypocritical that it makes me laugh. We're doing well on statements so far. We are, we love statements. We should have a list. Guys, anyone who sees maybe other ludicrous statements that you think we should analyze.

29:40We've had Belgian football, which I actually enjoyed. We've had HP. Well, the Belgian football one was a cracker, wasn't it? It was just the anti-corporate, wasn't it? It was honest. It was honest. It was brilliant. It was honest, yeah. Anyway, moving on. Moving on. Let's get back to the world of football. And what we're going to cover this week is in relation to the release of the much now storied, I almost feel, Deloitte Football Money League. Now, rather than just doing a broad general assessment of it, I think what we have picked out or what you picked out when we were talking about it is a really interesting, lever that's being pulled that separates some of the top clubs in Europe with some of the others and I'll just to position this to tee you up give a tiny overview of some of the stats because what I found most interesting firstly in this was that none of the top four teams one two three and four were English so the top four in the money league were Real Madrid Barcelona Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain.

30:38The top 20 clubs generated 12 billion euros in total. Madrid followed up last year's success where they became the first club to exceed the 1 billion revenue mark with just under 1.2 billion this year. Now the cumulative revenue of the money league clubs grew by 11 % this year so we're still seeing an increase but the diversification of that revenue is something that we'll start to take a look at because we're seeing an increase in match day revenue. Broadcast is being less influential than it has been previously. Should we say to the top 10 clubs, the clubs that came 10th to 20th still relied to almost 50 % of their revenues on broadcast, but in the top 10, it went to about a third of that number.

31:22So should we use that as the entry point? First of all, I want to sort of just say the fact that there are no English clubs in the top four is not as interesting as it sounds, right? It's an easy line. But actually, if you look at it in broad terms, what you've got is you've got Real and Barca at a billion plus, right? Then you've got a gap to, broadly speaking, the big six English clubs plus Bayern and PSG, who are between 550 and 750, 800 million a year, right? Now, the differences between those clubs is significantly governed by circumstance, Charlie, which is did this or that team qualify for the Champions League?

32:06So for instance, Chelsea is lower than it normally would be because it wasn't in the Champions League that season, right? And they didn't have a shirt sponsor. Thank you very much. Absolutely right. So if you take the lack of Champions League money and the lack of a shirt sponsor, that's 100 million, right? So instead of having, I think it was 550 million or 560 million, normally they would have been at 660 million, right? So therefore much more comparable with that core group. So obviously in PSG's case, it was an absolute whopper of a season where they both won the Champions League and qualified for the World Club Cup final as well, right?

32:41So fantastic. That would have triggered lots of bonus payments. Don't forget sponsorship agreements are not flat. You get a certain amount, then you get a certain amount more for qualifying for the Champions League. Then you get a certain amount more for qualifying for the Champions League knockout stages, and you get a certain amount more for winning the Champions League, right? So their sponsorship agreements would have absolutely boomed off the back of winning the Champions League. So the way I want you to think about this is you've got the two big Spanish clubs, a billion plus. Then you've got the next eight, which is the six big English clubs, plus Bayern, plus PSG, who are in that sort of 650, 700, 750, 800 bit and bouncing around between those, depending on how well they've done that season.

33:23Then you've got to jump down to the next level, which is a mixture of a small number of clubs who are the biggest clubs in their particular league in Europe. So you might have the Milan clubs. In Italy, you might have Benfica in Portugal. Yeah, Inter 11 is the first. And then you've got them accompanied with a group of the secondary English teams like West Ham and Newcastle and Aston Villa and all these types of clubs, right? Now, I guess it's a way of saying I didn't find it particularly interesting. This is what I would have expected, right? Now, but the detail in there that you refer to, when the Europeans whinge about EPL dominance, what they mean is the mid-ranking EPL teams, right?

34:04What they mean is that the ability of Brentford to have the same kind of revenues as Sporting Lisbon is something that makes them whinge, right? Because they're like, how's that happen? Brentford only get 15 ,000 spectators of their game. Well, it's because effectively both the EPL has the biggest TV revenues and they decide to share it equally, right? So if you dig down below into the 20 biggest clubs, then you see 10 English teams in the 20 biggest clubs. And then basically almost the entire Premier League is contained within the 30 biggest clubs. So effectively, the EPL is dominant, but other leagues effectively, the little top bits of the other leagues are able to be competitive with the Premier League, but only by shafting their competitors.

34:49That's the problem. This is the key, and this is why I found this really interesting, because when we were pulling apart the PCCI, the way that Madrid and Barca actually have generated a lot of their money can be looked at quite similarly to how you have this massive percentage dominance in cricket. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So if you just look in TV distributions, right, Real and Barca are taking home like 170 million euros a year. The smallest clubs in La Liga will be at about 35 million euros a year, right? Now, if you think about the Premier League as being graded between, I think it's about sort of 150 and 115, right?

35:26So that's the gap in the Premier League. And even that is distributed mostly based on where you finished in the league. Real and Barca, where they mop up is that La Liga includes faintly nefarious sort of conditions around, how big is your audience, how many people watch your matches and all this type of stuff, which I totally understand. And it's the same premise that India used for giving themselves all the TV money from the ICC. But it does mean that they've then got an uncompestive league where the vast majority of matches in that league are not of interest to anyone outside of Spain, which is why their international TV revenues are bad, which is why the rest of the league can't compete with the Premier League.

36:02Well, don't cry about it. You're creating a system that, you know, is going to reward you in some ways and penalise you in others. Yes, correct. Yeah. I mean, the main thing that... Anyway, that's not what we wanted to talk about. So I want to talk about matchday revenues, right? Because this is, you know, the dog that is starting to bark in the night, right? So yes, it is true that Real and Barca, by shafting the rest of their league, can get TV revenues, domestic TV revenues, which are actually a little bit bigger than the English clubs, broadly similar, but a little bit bigger. But that's not how and why they're bigger than the English clubs.

36:36I mean, 10 million maybe, but not 200 million, not 250 million. there are two areas in which they are out outpacing the english clubs one of which is commercial um they have an advantage commercially which is that within their own geography they are absolutely dominant barcelona i know espanol exists etc but barcelona is a big city with one dominant club right same with bayern in munich there is another munich club but it's not significant and the same with PSG in Paris there's really one big Paris club and one much much much much smaller one so commercially if you are a major business in these geographies there's only one show in town for you to get behind and it's very noticeable when you go to German football clubs that the major industrial entities locally all get behind the local club which is not just a club of that city it's normally the club of the state because Germany is a federated country where Each state has historic significance.

37:37So if you're Bayern, you're not just getting everyone from Munich, all the big businesses from Munich. But basically, if you are a significant-sized business in Bavaria, then you need to be getting behind Bayern Munich. Otherwise, your customers and your staff are going to be asking you why not. So that's commercial. And I think English clubs have a disadvantage in that regard, in that there are many more of them which are reasonably successful, competing over the same corporate dollars. when you get to the very, very top levels of the multinationals, there's also the problem of those multinationals having to judge when they put their money with an English club.

38:07They could go through a lien spell here. They could go through two or three years of my sponsorship agreement with them when they don't win anything and they don't even qualify for Europe. And that's happened to Man United over the last few years. Whereas really with Real and Barca and Bayern and co, you know. You know that every year they're going to either win their league or come second in their league and they're going to qualify for the Champions League, etc. So I just want to put commercial to one side as well and say that there are, I think there is commercial development to be done of the English game.

38:34I think sometimes we are, certainly compared to the American sports, a little bit unimaginative about how we commercialize. I think some of the bigger clubs in Europe are starting to get ahead of us in these regards as well. But there are mitigating circumstances. But match day revenues, that's the money that you take in through your stadium when you play a match. Real and Barca are starting to really motor ahead in this regard, right? So match day revenues over the last year, Real took 232 million and Barca 210, but that's going to go up. Real has spent vast amounts of money developing their stadium and Barca are just finishing off, completing the massive extension of the Nou Camp, which will probably take them even beyond where Real are.

39:13So I think you're quite likely looking at a situation where very soon Real and Barca will be at 250 million a year match day revenues. Now let's have a look at the big six English clubs. Man U are the biggest at 190 million. Arsenal, 180 odd million. Spurs, 150. Liverpool, 150. Bayern, Munich actually. That happens also 150. Chelsea, 100 last year, but with no Champions League. So you have to be a bit careful there. But they do have a smaller stadium, as you know, very, very well. And then Man City, 90, right? Got to sell out a stadium, though. Well, we'll come on to Man City in a moment. So what you're looking at is a situation within the next year where Real Madrid, I think, will have match day revenue 150 million a year higher than Man City.

40:03Why does this matter? This matters, first of all, because obviously it matters to the owners of the club because that's how much money they have to spend on running the operation. And if they don't have enough, they might have to put some in and all this type of stuff. But actually, that's kind of a thing of the past because we're moving on to cost control mechanisms. In other words, the amount you're allowed to spend on your first team squad, which are determined as a percentage of your revenues. So effectively, what UEFA have said is if you want to play in European competition, you can only spend 70 % of the revenue that you generate on your first team squad, wages, net transfer fees, your manager, coaches.

40:45That all has to come within 70%. So effectively, for every extra$100 million that you generate, right, compared to a competitor club, you are being allowed an additional$70 million to spend on your first team, right? So in other words, if Real are going to have matchday revenues of$150 million more than Man City, you're looking at an allowable additional spend on their first team of an extra$100 million a year. So this is just a little warning shot, right? Which is that English clubs have been able to grow themselves and be able to keep pace with the Spanish giants through the growth of the Premier League's TV revenues, right?

41:30Over the last 20 years. And also obviously be able to accelerate well clear of those leagues that don't have such great TV revenues, like France, like Holland, like Portugal, and so on and so forth. Great. has it made us a little bit lazy about our stadiums and about the size of our stadiums because at the moment i'm just going to just these last few data points for bringing you in for your view the premier league is operating at 99.5 percent utility right so in other words there's basically they're sold out right to all intents and purposes the premier league is sold out. The Bundesliga is at 95%.

42:07La Liga is at 75%. As it happens, Serie A about 80 % and League One in France about 85%. So the only league that is sold out is the Premier League. Now, I remember when I was in the publishing business, I was asked a trick question when I was a young wannabe publisher. What's the ideal number of newspapers that are left at the end of the day in each news agent if you're the publisher? And I said, well, none. No, no, one. Because you want to make sure that everybody who wanted to buy your newspaper had an opportunity to buy your newspaper. You don't want to be in a situation where people are turning up to the news agents, finding that your newspaper's sold out, and then having to move on to a different product and getting addicted to a different product and so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera.

42:50Now, the Premier League is not just at 99.5%. They've got the most astonishing waiting lists. I mean, I actually had, I knew that they were big. I didn't realize how big. Liverpool, 25 years. Man U, 25 years. Arsenal, 20 years. Leeds, eight years. Aston Villa, six years. Everton, five years. Spurs, three years. Forest, three years. Bournemouth, closed. Newcastle, closed. So if you're a young person and you want to become a season ticket holder at one of these EPL clubs, what's the current answer? You have to go somewhere else. Yeah, you do. And I think that's driving a significant increase in attendance in the championship, by the way, which is now the second most attended league in Europe.

43:31But anyway, that's a story for another day. This is my question to you. Real Madrid and Barca either have spent or, in the case of Barca, are spending$1 billion on massively increasing the size of and improving their stadiums, right? Why are the English clubs not doing this when they're at full capacity? So there is absolutely no question that this moves the needle. and I don't believe the owners in England are naive to it. I think the broader circumstances of actually making these possible in England makes it far harder now. Decisions generally do sit with local councils, not the regional authorities in England.

44:06As I said, heavy weight is given to the residents. There's often a spatial issue. If we're looking at it, though, Spain centrally, there's more of that funding that comes from central and regional government. This is the key thing. Germany, I looked at it as fast as owning processes for sports infrastructure. This is the key thing. They make it easier. France, strong state involvement, especially around major events. You got it. In England, the costs of doing a lot of this, they have to be absorbed by the clubs. So, and not only that, but it's also then it's the roads, the infrastructure, the transport.

44:34That is the biggest thing. So just this morning, I wanted to make sure that we're on solid ground here, not just speculating, right? So I put in a call into my friends at Trivandi, who are probably one of the largest stadium architecture and building consultancies around. and they did the work in the new sound of Villa, for instance, and they're an international business. So I called them and I asked them exactly this question. And it turns out, I'm delighted to tell you that you are correct. You are absolutely right in everything you were saying at the end there. The single biggest issue is that whereas on the continent, i.e.

45:10in continental Europe within the EU countries, the local government, the national government will pick up, and not just pick up, happily pick up, the infrastructure cost. So this is, if a new road needs to be put in, they'll do it. If a tram needs to be put in, they'll do it, right? Their perception is, is that this will drive economic activity, and this will be good for the city and for the prestige of the city as a whole. Secondly, as you said, quite correctly again, is that in most EU countries, and I've noticed this in Belgium, there is a presumption in favour of the sporting organisation when it comes to zoning.

45:44So in other words, other people have to prove why it's not a good idea. to have sports expanded and done bigger and better and all this type of stuff because people broadly think the more and the better we have sports, the healthier the population and so on and so forth. In our country, we have this hangover from the hooligan days where it's a nimby sense of I don't want football fans peeing in my front garden. Now, I have to say, as somebody who used to live in one of the streets adjoining Stamford Bridge and having had Chelsea fans peeing in my front garden, I understand the sense. I'm sure it wasn't you, Charlie, by the way.

46:18You'd have been too young at the time. It could well have been me. It might have been you. I'll ask Dad. Ask Dad. So you're absolutely right. It's the cost of the infrastructure that's the problem. And I've seen a bit of this with the new stadium project. One of the few new stadiums that's meant to be going ahead right now is at my home club, which I was long involved with, Oxford United. So Oxford United has got a horrific stadium situation. They rent a three-sided stadium in a bad part of Oxford with bad transport infrastructure, and they are moving to a site which is adjacent to the new railway station, Oxford Parkway, right, which then enables the whole county of Oxford, of Oxfordshire, because Oxford United is not really Oxford United, it's Oxfordshire United, most of the fans come from different parts of the county, to access the stadium by train, right?

47:07So you would have thought, given everything we know about environmental concerns, that local governments and national governments say, this is a great project. At the moment, everyone's having a drive to a stadium, Now they're all going to go there by train. This is terrific. We're going to support this. Well, first of all, it took, I think, a number of years to get through planning for all the reasons that you outlined. You've got the bat person. Then you've got the person who says there's going to be noise pollution three miles away and all this type of stuff. And there might be a frog colony.

47:38Genuinely, I think there was a concern about a frog colony. But then you get into, well, if we're going to utilize the railway station, we're going to need to build a bridge. who's going to pay for that oh well the club should pay for that when you start putting in bridges and new roads the cost and the roi based off that change very radically so the cost of oxford united's new stadium which is only going to be 16 000 seats right so it's not a large stadium and it's going to be um much better for the county as a whole it's gonna be better environmentally it's also going to release the land that it was the previous games built on for housing which Oxford desperately needs.

48:16So there's every reason in the world for local government to say, this is a great thing, we should support it. But then they've gone and said to the club, no, you're going to have to pay for all of the transport infrastructure. And that's then taken the cost of that stadium from what I reckon would be about 80 or 90 million to about 130 million. That additional 30 to 40 million pounds is absolutely critical when it comes to measuring ROI, right? So if we then take that up some levels to really, really big stadiums of the kind that we might be talking about, and you say, right, you know, how long is it going to take?

48:43how much is that process going to come? Not the building, the process. How much is the process going to start? Because I believe that Oxford spent 10 million plus just on the planning process, right? For a business whose total revenues were only 20 million a year. Can I ask you, why do you think it's taken so long for Man United to get themselves together on this? Because let's not look financially. Debt for these stadiums now is pretty regular. It's easily achievable. And when you're generating 800 million, let's say a year, you can finance your two and a half billion, three billion stadium through that.

49:12so why do you reckon for them when it's been so clear so obvious that this is a massive needle mover particularly for a club that's had a really tough time over the last 15 years why do you think it hasn't been achieved yet i honestly think that that these clubs i know that these clubs do feasibility studies and all the factors that you originally outlined and that my friends at trivandy confirmed then come into play right you go out and speak to the consultants the consultants come back with a report and basically the report says do you really need to do this like do you know how painful this is going to be are you now if you're tottenham hotspur and you're previously at the old white heart lane which was you know totally unfit for purpose and you know that you can double treble your revenues by moving to a new stadium then you say okay we have to bite the bullet here we can't compete playing out of that stadium but if you're in a stadium in england at the moment that is fit for purpose right it it works it you know man you're doing match day revenue of 190 million a year and you're told right if you develop a big big big new stadium you could take your match day revenues from 190 million a year to 250 million a year right to compete with real and barca you go okay that sounds good like that the consultants come back and say oh by the way it costs real and barca a billion but it's going to cost you one and a half billion why because we're in england and you have to pay for everything and it's going to take you much longer and lots of people are going to complain and the whole thing is going to the building costs will be higher everything's just be much much much much so i think probably there was there was one other factor that was raised by trivandi just to put on the table which is that real and barca have stability of ownership which is they are owned by their fans so they can take five 10 15 20 year views we don't have stability of ownership within english football right so in other words manu is you know well documented been changing in the balance not quite sure where's that going to go etc etc spurs in the balance liverpool there have been strong rumors about fenway potentially selling at some point whatever it might be um chelsea obviously recently sold and we we already mentioned two or three weeks ago that they're on a private equity cycle so in four or five years time might well be different owners again etc etc so you're in a situation where it's quite you know when these reports come saying you could do it but it's going to take you six eight ten years where you can see some owners thinking in all likelihood i might not be the owner in six eight ten years do i want to be the one who takes on all the cost and hassle of enabling this thing to happen only to then basically sell the club in the meantime and then somebody else comes in and gets the advantage of all of that you know yeah except so i think it's your politics piece isn't it you want to be the prime minister that brings the nuclear power stations through when you're not going to see the benefit of them until 20 years and you're well out of office exactly do you think it's a broader uh look at where football and the value of football really sits within this country think about football's origins in this country as a working class sport it's it's the sport of the people everywhere but in other eu countries which either have less clearly delineated class systems or elsewhere.

52:13Football just dominates throughout the class system. So when I'm in Belgium, one of my Belgian partners is the local aristocrat. Another one is a guy, a local boy made good. Another one might be somebody who started off with an inherited a business, made it a bit bigger and all this. These are my partners in Belgium. And they come from throughout the social spectrum. So I'll get one of my partners will say to me one day, oh, you know, what were you doing? Yes, I'll say, what were you doing yesterday while I was at one of my supermarkets and doing X, Y, and Z? Another one will say, my other partners will say, I was out shooting with a king, right?

52:49This is normal in Belgium. It's normal in Italy. It's normal in Spain for people from the very top of the social spectrum in Spain, the Royal Family, et cetera, right the way down to the bottom to be involved in the sport and to have been involved throughout the sport in that country. This simply has not been the case here, right? Here until very recently, the middle class even only started to get involved about 30 years ago. The political economy culture has been basically that football's a nuisance. So if you go back to the ID card issues with the Thatcher government in the 80s, going through into the whole Hillsborough report, it's like, what are we going to do with all these hooligans?

53:24What are we going to do with these sort of ghastly, derelict old stadiums that catch fire when they have all these fights, et cetera, et cetera? So it's just been like, can you please get this off my desk? I don't want to think about football. Instead of viewing it as an opportunity. Now, football itself has then leave itself off the ground and become massively successful in this country through the doings of the big Premier League clubs, with no help from the government whatsoever. In fact, more standing in the way than helping most of the time. And now the government looks and goes, wow, it's a great export industry.

53:51It's part of Great Britain PLC. But do they then think of it genuinely like they would think of the defense industry or the pharmaceutical industry or the nuclear research industry and say we actually need to support it? A bit of support here would enable this to become a globally dominant force rather like we were saying with Indian cricket earlier on where the Indian government is integrally involved in the promotion of Indian cricket. No, our government still basically says, well, they should look after it themselves. They should pay for everything themselves. They got lots of money. I mean, really.

54:19So when it comes to things like stadium projects, instead of seeing them as an exciting way of increasing the dominance of the Premier League, which then drives more and more money around the economy. So anyway, I think we can probably close off the issue here by saying that I didn't see much of huge interest in the Deloitte report. much of it was as seen, but there's a little red flashing light on the dashboard saying if English clubs do not invest or are not encouraged to invest or do not feel enabled to invest significantly in their stadiums over the next five or 10 years, there is a danger that not just Real and Barca, but other European clubs are going to start increasing the gap on matchday revenues.

54:58So that if at any point the TV revenue starts to come down a little bit, then you could start to see the EPL's dominance being called into question. Charlie's cutting-edge analysis. Again, looking at a report and picking out the most interesting things I'd expect. Interesting to me. I'm not saying they're interested to everybody. I'm sure this will inspire quite a lot of opinions and thoughts from fans. So we'd love to hear some of your thoughts on it, especially if you are, let's say, a Spurs fan or a fan that's been part of a transition to a new stadium and what that's brought you. It'd be great to hear the flip side of it and how you think that's gone.

55:27Now, the next topic, I almost have to just leave the introduction to Charlie because it's on his specialist topic. Well, it features his specialist topic of TikTok.

55:40keep talking TikTok Charlie come on okay so there was a miraculous thing I mean I call it miraculous because it it really did surprise me and I loved it for all the reasons we're about to explain but I'm going to set it up and then you can do the description because there's an article that came out which showed Steve Borthwick encouraging the unlikely the unlikely Steve Borthwick who I'd love to see in a TikTok himself encouraging the use of TikTok amongst his players and recognizing, should we say, the value of rugby players and particularly the England rugby players having a presence that's translated from the pitch into modern media and most importantly, should we say, the youthful audience that rugby is trying to attract.

56:22You've set it up really beautifully there. So what happened was this. In the build-up to the New Zealand game in the Orton Internationals, four England players, namely Freeman, Smith, Stewart and Pollock released a TikTok video which is kind of them jigging around I mean it's sort of semi-coordinated you can you remember the moves do you wanna I can remember them but I'm not gonna try and imitate them they're more you're they're more your age than me Charlie if you want to go down that route I shall by popular demand I shall clap yep if enough people enjoy this Charlie and I will do that that will definitely not be popular so this video went out and this is in a hotel room right this is in a hotel room so they're in a hotel room they're not wearing anything particularly interesting they're just jigging around right literally sandwiched it's quite a funny look i do encourage anyone to go anyway the bottom line is it went viral and it has been viewed 22 million times and therefore by definition its audience has gone way outside what the normal audience would be for any england rugby game whether it be to attend live or to watch it on tv and it's introduced these guys into a much broader audience what i find fascinating and admirable is steve borthwick having the strategic understanding to be able to embrace this as saying hang on a second i do have a responsibility to win matches right now and my players taking part in tiktok videos aren't going to particularly necessarily help that probably won't harm it but won't help it um but i also have a broader responsibility to the growth of rugby as a whole and the health of english rugby as a whole it's It's my style of thinking, my God, I know this guy looks a bit unlikely, but he looks like when people start saying that kind of stuff, Woodward had a similarly broad vision about rugby as a whole.

58:05Then you start thinking this person's a serious leader. This is so uncommon from a head coach. So uncommon. I mean, literally, it's normally exactly the opposite. This is the way it normally happens, Charlie, in a football club. And I'm sure it's the same in rugby as well. In fact, rugby in some ways often is more conservative than football. So media guy has an idea for TikTok video. He comes to me as the chief executive and says, boss, I've had a great idea. If we did this, I think it would be super cool. I think we get a lot of engagement. Okay, well, why are you seeing me? Can you go and speak to the coach about it?

58:38Because he knows if he goes and speaks to him about it, he'll be sent away with a flea in his ear, right? So I then arrange a meeting with the coach when I put two or three other items on the agenda. And then at the bottom of the agenda, I put media, right? I don't. So I say, so this thing. Oh, and by the way. This thing that you wanted to upgrade the lunch, sort of the quality of the chicken in the lunch, okay, sort of do that. This thing you said here about where you need to stay overnight in a hotel for this game, which is only 45 minutes away, etc. Maybe, okay, can we have a talk about that?

59:08And then right at the end, oh, and by the way, just our media guy said, can we just do a TikTok? Hoping he's just going to say yes, so I don't have to have the battle of him over this, because actually normally the players do want to do it, right? But the first thing if you go straight to the players, they'll say quite reasonably is what does the gaffer think you know they don't want to go and do something so to have borthwick there as the leader of of the playing side of the organization saying i think this is a good thing for rugby i welcome it then gives license for the media people within the rfu setup and the players to have a genuinely creative relationship where they can start thinking about so don't forget that football and rugby players when they're in camp many hours a day they're very bored oh very very bored right so they've got lots of time to do this stuff now i think another interesting question is is does it make a difference right and there'll be more traditional listeners more traditionally minded listen maybe some old people more at my age maybe who think yeah okay fine but is it worth it does it actually make a difference and i think to be honest you increasingly the answer is yes it does make a difference now you can talk about it both medium term and short term medium term you can certainly make the case that reaching younger audiences and developing the personalities of the players in such a way that you meet the potential audience where they want to be met, which is on social media, as opposed to...

1:00:23You go to them. You go to them rather than doing an interview with a newspaper that a young person's never going to read. But even in short terms, actually, it does have an impact. And I want to use an example here, which is also rugby, but women's rugby rather than men's rugby. One of the biggest professional sports person, social media personalities in the world is a lady called Ilona Maha, an American women's rugby player, professional rugby player. She plays sevens for the USA and also recently played 15s in the recent Women's World Cup as well. So she's a proper professional. And came over and played for Bristol as well.

1:00:59Well, but that's what I'm about to get into. So Ilona Maha has 10 million subscribers across TikTok and Instagram, right? Miles above most male, almost all male rugby players. Well, no, all. Siakalisi is the next with 1.5 million. Right. 10x 7x 10x right so what was interesting was last year Bristol Women's Rugby Club Bristol Bears Women's Rugby Club signed Ilona Maher to play for about a third of the season it was about four or five six or seven matches something like that I can't remember the exact number but it included obviously three or four home matches and the idea really was we need something to trigger interest in coming and paying money to watch women's rugby right So this was a perfect control study because you know you've got somebody with enormous social media reach coming to an event where you know what the average attendance is normally, which was, I believe, about 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 with a record attendance of about 4 ,000.

1:01:58What impact is a social media star who is also a proper player going to have on attendances? Straight away, 9 ,250. and 50. So more than double the record attendance paid good money to turn up for the first game that Ilona Ma had played for Bristol. This stuff works. This stuff is important. And I salute Steve Borthwick, the unlikely figure of Steve Borthwick, the visionary leader for saying this is relevant because he's fighting against the force of conservatism within rugby. Rugby struggled for this for years. We've had so many conversations with people in and around rugby around the challenge of creating global superstars in the sport and the need now in sport to have them and so rugby when it's been looking at this and looking at its aging demographics and problems with should we say translating some of that international audience we've spoken about to the club rugby game you need to have the superstars to be able to do that now when we've asked why that hasn't happened the thing that comes back every single time is this is a collective culture it's a team game no single head above the parapet and rugby has been built on that it's been built on the power of the dressing room and almost like this conservative pride the collective pride and any individual who who kind of stepped beyond that that was pushed away think of your danny cipriani's and stuff you know the world who then really struggled so to do that is has been a massive problem and i understand it but it definitely holds the sport back there are two quotes here charlie there's one from shout burger and one from both but both of them are about pollock so So Schaltberger, the voice of conservative Africana rugby.

1:03:27Pollock is a TikTok dancer who plays a bit of rugby on the weekend. It's great, isn't it? Right? I mean, I love that. You can just see them just getting riled up. Just getting really riled up about this. Borthwick. There was a kid at a junior rugby game I went to the other day who was wearing black tape around his head because he wanted to be Henry Pollock. I love that. Right? Now, they're both talking about exactly the same thing, but Borthwick is connected to the reality of today, whereas Berger is looking back to the way in which things have been traditionally in the past where there would be a problem within the team if one person became a bit more of a star.

1:04:00After Borthwick said about the black tape around the head, the next line he said was about how you can have that collective team value and have an individual superstar. Dan Bigger said when we were chatting, Dan Bigger said that he had no doubt that Northampton Saints and his attendance rates recently had been massively driven by Henry Pollock's participation. So these players are what we need. the reality of individual power, more of this type of thinking. This is what the sport needs. It is. And I think it's just recognizing the media of today, right? The idea of having individual stars within rugby is not new.

1:04:30I mean, when I was young, the biggest star in world rugby was David Campesi. Yeah. And he was not always doing media appearance of all his teammates. I can promise you that. He was very much on his own, saying his own thing, shooting from the hip, etc., etc. So this is, you know, and even actually probably around the time, the biggest rugby star in the UK at the time was Jonathan Davies, the Welsh fly half who moved from Union to Rugby League, He was a big star in both ones, also a big media personality, etc. Great guy, but definitely an individual star, right? Definitely very much an individual star.

1:04:57So I don't think, you know, the idea of rugby having individual stars has happened before. Previously, that stardom was expressed through linear TV, through newspapers, because this was the only way in which you could get to grips with these personalities. TikTok is simply taking up where that leaves off. But I love the fact that Borthwick, as somebody of my generation, has got the self-confidence, the strategic breadth, and to understand this isn't just about what makes me feel happy as a 45, 50-year-old guy who used to do things a certain way. I've got a broader responsibility here. And actually, if we could grow rugby, that's going to be better for everybody.

1:05:35And it's athletes owning their own media. It's another pointer towards them creating their own channels, having their own distribution. You see it with YouTube. tennis has done it quite well where the players you know as we said last week independent contractors often um responsible for a lot of their own bryson and golf bryson and golf doing amazing things these blurring of boundaries these crossing of of attention spans rubby can't afford to be outside that rubby can't afford to be outside of it nemi osaka walks on the tennis court the other day you know and and said jokingly in her um you know carrying her umbrella and her dress that her biggest concern was fitting down the the walkway in the australian open tunnel now does does anyone really remember the result of that match?

1:06:12No. Do people remember what she brought to that moment? They do. Yeah. And these things, you know, obviously some people, the purists turn around and they go, oh, we don't really like that. That's not in the game of tennis. You're fighting for attention. You're fighting for attention. It's competitive, you know. The only pressure she's putting is on herself. Yeah, absolutely. You know, if she loses that match, then people can turn around and go, are you focused? But if, you know, that's on her. That's her cool. And for all of this, you can have the fears around what it does. Does it distract? Does it, you know, It's the old Mourinho, Guardiola piece around being focused, Ferguson.

1:06:43You know, but sport's different now. Right. Fascinating. Right. We got there in the end. We did indeed. We got there in the end. Another week under the belt. And we're just coming into a part of the year where there's going to be a lot of sports starting up. The next few weeks, I think, are going to be absolutely fascinating. We were saying, weren't we? Super Bowl, T20 World Cup. Winter Olympics. Winter Olympics. The Six Nations, of course. Six Nations, of course. Starts as well. So, yeah, a huge amount on. as always as we said please more suggestions more things that you find interesting let us know your thoughts and we'll see you next week Charlie thank you so much thanks Charlie have a good one thank you so much for joining us for another big week of sports news some emotionally charged discussion points in there and inevitability when talking about sport and how it impacts people beyond the end result I really hope you enjoyed the show and please keep the comments and suggestions for topics flowing there is so much we could cover so having a better idea of what you want to hear helps us tailor this to you.

1:07:41Thank you as always for joining us and we'll see you next week.